2018 was a great year for Clever Endeavour Games. We hired Gen, our community manager, we launched our game on the Nintendo Switch, and we won a Playstation Award as one of the top indie games in Japan. We released a couple of videos with some of our reflections of 2018 and resolutions for 2019, and wanted to share those with you.

We also wanted to mention that we’re nearing completion of our next update, which we’ll announce as soon as it goes through certification and we can confirm a date. There’s some really interesting stuff in there, and we think it will give players the tools to do even wackier things with their favourite Chicken and Horse-based game.

Like we did last month, we’ll just leave these gifs here for you to ponder and come up with ideas about what this might mean for Ultimate Chicken Horse.

As we finish up this update and move into hardcore testing mode on it, we’re starting to talk about new ideas and think about what we’ll be working on next. There’s no consensus of any one project idea, nor do we think there will be any information made public about that for a little while, but we’re looking forward to working on new stuff and the change of pace will be fun and exciting for everyone on the team.

Oh also, we went curling as a team activity right after the holidays, and it was really fun. A few sore butts later, we have some great pictures and good memories. (Those are some +1s by the way, we didn’t expand the team size yet 😛).

We’ve got a bunch of fun stuff to share with you as we roll into the holidays, to enjoy some time in the snow… or some time in the warm shelter from the snow. But before we get to sipping hot chocolate and curling up under warm blankets, we’ve got to tell you what we’ve been working on…

Or maybe you can tell us. What’s going on here? What could this mean? What madness might come to you in the next Ultimate Chicken Horse update??

We’ve been… experimenting with things.

We’ll just leave those images there for your imagination, feel free to make noise about it online and try to figure it out… the only hint we’ll give you is that next update (no date confirmed yet for release) will have a whole bunch of wicked stuff in it.

Preset Contest Winner

As you may have seen last month, we set up a contest to submit your favourite rule preset for Ultimate Chicken Horse! We asked for what custom rules, point values, custom block probabilities, etc. that you use to create some interesting gameplay, and we had some fantastic submissions. Check out this video of some of the Clever Endeavour team trying out the preset!

Party Pack Promo!

If you haven’t seen it yet, we’re part of the Multiplayer Party Pack on Steam, a collection of great local and online multiplayer games that will cause you to hate your friends just as much as Ultimate Chicken Horse does. Not only do you get a discount for buying the party pack together, but many of the games are on sale so the discount is even bigger! It’s honestly ridiculously cheap, and perfect for the holidays with family, friends, and soon-to-be enemies.

This month has been a busy one, and we’ve got an update about the fix we made to Ultimate Chicken Horse on the Nintendo Switch, our new preset save feature, Eve’s time at TwitchCon, and Rich’s time at MEGA game expo and MIGS conference.

Switch Bug Fix

After a long month of figuring out what was wrong and a slow certification process we finally released our latest patch on Nintendo Switch. This patch fixes the issue people were having where the Switch would crash randomly when returning to the treehouse, and fixes the issue of not being able to unlock new content after the Chimply Amazing update. For the full patch notes, you can go here.

While we were in the certification process for the patch, we’ve been working on new content which we’ll be bringing to the public as soon as possible. We don’t want to talk too much about it yet and we don’t have a date set for the content to launch, but there’s some really cool stuff going on and we’re pretty psyched for it. More on that soon, sorry for the tease!

Presets and Preset Contest

In case you didn’t know, in Ultimate Chicken Horse you can make custom game rules and then save those game rules as presets. Game rules that can be changed include things like:

How many points to win the round

How much each point type is worth

Which blocks are allowed to be used

How many pieces are placed per Creative Mode round

Whether or not there’s a double party box for two or more players

And much more!

You can find more information about the feature on the Presets page, and we’re running a contest to find some of the coolest player-created presets! Details of the contest are also on that page, and it ends on November 30th!

Apart from content work for the game, we had a couple of exciting events that we attended! First off, Eve went to TwitchCon in San Jose. Then, Rich attended the Montreal Expo Gaming Arcade (MEGA) and the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS).

Eve’s Thoughts on TwitchCon (written by Eve)

TwitchCon marked the end of a crazy busy October for me, and sunny San Jose was the perfect place to conclude my month of business travels. I kicked off the convention by attending the Developer Day, where I got some valuable knowledge about Twitch Integrations and upcoming features. There’s some ideas I’d like to explore in the future, because I love watching streamers play Ultimate Chicken Horse, and we could make the experience even better for them and their audience!

During the public part of the conference, I had the pleasure of meeting the most prolific Ultimate Chicken Horse content creator - also a streamer I’ve been following for years - Ryan “Northernlion” Letourneau. I got to chat briefly with him and his wife Kate “lovelymomo” during his Meet & Greet session, before snapping the obligatory selfie and having him sign a custom-made poster that is now displayed on our office wall.

I spent the rest of that day hanging out Last_Grey_Wolf, HCJustin, unrulybabs, and their friends. We chatted about the industry, Twitch bounties, the indie life, and a lot of other things. The following days were similarly people-focused, including a casual morning meetup with the inimitable Sean “day[9]” Plott and his community of dayknights, who are at the origin of my interest in the games industry. Definitely, TwitchCon was all about the community for me, and about bridging the usual divides to bring everyone together as part of a big, beautiful ecosystem.

Rich’s Thoughts on MEGA and MIGS

A couple of weeks ago was the second time the MEGA event happened. Last year’s event was quite small, but oversold tickets by almost two times the capacity. This year the show got bigger, and attendance was once again higher than expected. We didn’t show anything in a booth, although we did have Ultimate Chicken Horse in the multiplayer zone where a bunch of local multiplayer games were set up. It was super nice to see people (mostly kids) enjoying the multiplayer zone and laughing with each other around our game.

The expo has a lot of the cool Montreal games that we already know well like Boyfriend Dungeon, Blood Roots, Speed Brawl, and more, but it also had some games I hadn’t seen yet. Of those games, the two I really wanted to mention were Zarvot and Somos:

Zarvot is a lovely game where you shoot your way through a wonderfully written story, and somehow manage to get attached to the personality of your cube player and their companion very quickly. I played the single player mode, and the game feel was incredible: the movement, the jumping, the shooting, the dashing, all of it was solid and topped with a good story and great art. I didn’t play the local multiplayer mode, but I’ve heard only good things. Unfortunately it’s only on Switch now, but hopefully it’ll be on Steam at some point as well.

Somos is a trippy mobile (and Steam) game where you defend your circle from incoming shapes and forms. It requires a lot of focus and does a great job of really getting you into that state of flow that few games are able to do. You can check it out on Android or Steam!

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That’s all for today folks, please stay up to date with our social media if you want to stay informed and know what’s going on in the world of Clever Endeavour Games: